Courage

COURAGE

b: t.m.barrie

O- T—

CO

ST ANDREWS
MAY 3rd 1922

Presented to the

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY

by the

ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY

IQOO

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

Microsoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/couragejamesOObarruoft

COURAGE

/. M. BARRIE

THE UNIFORM EDITION OF
THE PLAYS OF /. M. BARRIE

QUALITY STREET
THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON
WHAT EVERY WOMAN KNOWS
A KISS FOR CINDERELLA
ALICE SIT-BY-THE-FIRE
THE TWELVE POUND LOOK

and Other Plays
THE OLD LADY SHOWS HER
MEDALS, and Other Plays
Other Titles to follow
Cloth 5/- net each. Leather 7/6 net each

IN ACTIVE PREPARATION

THE UNIFORM EDITION OF
THE WORKS OF J. M. BARRIE

A WINDOW IN THRUMS
AULD LICHT IDYLLS
WHEN A MANS SINGLE
MY LADY NICOTINE
MARGARET OGILVY
THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD
Cloth 5/- net each. Leather 7/6 net each

THE IMMORTAL PETER PAN

PETER PAN IN KENSINGTON GAR-
DENS. By J. M. BARRIE

Illustrated in Colour by Arthur Rackham.
Original Large Cloth Edition 251- net
Smaller Cloth Edition 10/6 net

PETER PAN AND WENDY

By J. M. BARRIE

Illustrated in colour by Mabel Lucie Attwell.
Cloth 15/- net
PETER AND WENDY.

By J. M. BARRIE
With Frontispiece in Colour and Half-tone Draw-
ings by F. D. Bedford.

Cloth 10/6 net

HODDER & STOUGHTON Ltd.,
Warwick Square, London, E.C. 4.

THE RECTORIAL ADDRESS DELIVERED

AT ST. ANDREWS UNIVERSITY

MAY 3rd 1922

COURAGE

541'
J. M. BARRIE

QNTARiq

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

111

^ c^

To the Red Gowns of St. Andrews

You have had many rectors here in St.
Andrews who will continue in bloom long after
the lowly ones such as I am are dead and rotten
and forgotten. They are the roses in Decem-
ber ; you remember someone said that God gave
us memory so that we might have roses in
December. But I do not envy the great ones.
In my experience — and you may find in the end
it is yours also — ^the people I have cared for
most and w^hohave seemed most worth caring for
— my December roses — ^have been very simple
folk. Yet I wish that for this hour I could swell
into someone of importance, so as to do you
credit. I suppose you had a melting for me
because I was hewn out of one of your own
quarries, walked similar academic groves, and
have trudged the road on which you will soon

Courage

set forth. I would that I could put into your
hands a staff for that somewhat bloody march,
for though there is much about myself that I
conceal from other people, to help you I would
expose every cranny of my mind.

But, alas, when the hour strikes for the Rector
to answer to his call he is unable to become
the undergraduate he used to be, and so the
only door into you is closed. We, your elders,
are much more interested in you than you are in
us. We are not really important to you. I
have utterly forgotten the address of the Rector
of my time, and even who he was, but I recall
vividly climbing up a statue to tie his colours
round its neck and being hurled therefrom with
contumely. We remember the important things.
I cannot provide you with that staff for your
journey; but perhaps I can tell you a little
about it, how to use it and lose it and find it
again, and cling to it more than ever. You
shall cut it — so it is ordained — ^every one of you
for himself, and its name is Courage. You

Courage

must excuse me if I talk a good deal about
courage to you to-day. There is nothing else
much worth speaking about to undergraduates
or graduates or white-haired men and women.
It is the lovely virtue— the rib of Himself that
God sent down to His children.

My special difficulty is that though you have
had literary rectors here before, they were the
big guns, the historians, the philosophers; you
have had none, I think, who followed my more
humble branch, which may be described as
playing hide and seek with angels. My puppets
seem more real to me than myself, and I could
get on much more swingingly if I made one
of them deliver this address. It is M'Connachie
who has brought me to this pass. M'Connachie,
I should explain, as I have undertaken to open
the innermost doors, is the name I give to the
unruly half of myself : the writing half. We
are complement and supplement. I am the
half that is dour and practical and canny, he is
the fanciful half ; my desire is to be jJ^^family

ONTARiO

Courage

solicitor, standing firm on my hearthrug among
the harsh realities of the office furniture ; while
he prefers to fly around on one wing. I should
not mind him doing that, but he drags me with
him. I have sworn that M'Connachie shall not
interfere with this address to-day ; but there is
no telling. I might have done things worth
while if it had not been for M'Connachie, and
my first piece of advice to you at any rate shall
be sound : don't copy me. A good subject for
a rectorial address would be the mess the
Rector himself has made of life. I merely cast
this forth as a suggestion, and leave the work-
ing of it out to my successor. I do not think it
has been used yet.

My own theme is Courage, as you should use
it in the great fight that seems to me to be
coming between youth and their betters ; by
youth, meaning, of course, you, and by your
betters us. I want you to take up this posi-
tion : That youth have for too long left exclu-
sively in our hands the decisions in national

I

Courage

matters that are more vital to them than to us.
Things about the next war, for instance, and
why the last one ever had a beginning. I use
the word fight because it must, I think, begin
with a challenge; but the aim is the reverse of
antagonism, it is partnership. I want you to
hold that the time has arrived for youth to
demand that partnership, and to demand it
courageously. That to gain courage is what
you come to St. Andrews for. With some
alarums and excursions into college life. That
is what I propose, but, of course, the issue lies
with M'Connachie.

Your betters had no share in the immediate
cause of the war ; we know what nation has that
blot to wipe out; but for fifty years or so we
heeded not the rumblings of the distant drum,
I do not mean by lack of military preparations ;
and when war did come we told youth, who had
to get us out of it, tall tales of what it really
is and of the clover beds to which it leads.

lo Courage

We were not meaning to deceive, most of us
were as honourable and as ignorant a^ the youth
themselves ; but that does not acquit us of fail-
ings such as stupidity and jealousy, the two
black spots in human nature which, more than
love of money, are at the root of all evil. If
you prefer to leave things as they are we shall
probably fail you again. Do not be too sure
that we have learned our lesson, and are not at
this very moment doddering down some brim-
stone path.

I am far from implying that even worse
things than war may not come to a State.
There are circumstances in which nothing can
so well become a land, as I think this land
proved when the late war did break out and
there was but one thing to do. There is a form
of anaemia that is more rotting than even an
unjust war. The end will indeed have come to
our courage and to us when we are afraid in
dire mischance to refer the final appeal to the

Courage 1 1

/

arbitrament of arms. I suppose all the lusty
of our race, alive and dead, join hands on that.

* And he is dead who will not fight ;
And who dies fighting has increase.'

But if you must be in the struggle, the more
reason you should know why, before it begins,
and have a say in the decision whether it is to
begin. The youth who went to the war had
no such knowledge, no such say ; I am sure the
survivors, of whom there must he a number here
to-day, want you to be wiser than they were, and
are certainly determined to be wiser next time
themselves. If you are to get that partnership,
which, once gained, is to be for mutual benefit,
it will be, I should say, by banding yourselves
with these men, not defiantly but firmly, not for
^elfish ends but for your country's good. In
the meantime they have one bulwark ; they have
a General who is befriending them as I think
never, after the fighting was over, has a General
befriended his men before. Perhaps the seemly

12 Courage

thing would be for us, their betters, to elect one
of these young survivors of the carnage to be
our Rector. He ought now to know a few
things about war that are worth our hearing.
If his theme were the Rector's favourite, dili-
gence, I should be afraid of his advising a
great many of us to be diligent in sitting still
and doing no more harm.

Of course he would put it more suavely than
that, though it is not, I think, by gentleness
that you will get your rights; we are dogged
ones at sticking to what we have got, and so
will you be at our age. But avoid calling us
ugly names; we may be stubborn and we may
be blunderers, but we love you more than
aught else in the world, and once you have
won your partnership we shall all be welcoming
you. I urge you not to use ugly names about
anyone. In the war it was not the fighting
men who were distinguished for abuse; as has
been well said, * Hell hath no fury like a non-
combatant.' Never ascribe to an opponent

Courage 13

motives meaner than your own. There may be
students here to-day who have decided this ses-
sion to go in for immortality, and would like
to know of an easy way of accomplishing it.
That is a way, but not so easy as you think. Go
through life without ever ascribing to your
opponents motives meaner than your own.
Nothing so lowers the moral currency ; give it
up, and be great.

Another sure way to fame is to know what
you mean. It is a solemn thought that almost
no one — if he is truly eminent — knows what
he means. Look at the great ones of the earth,
the politicians. We do not discuss what they
say, but what they may have meant when they
said it. In 1922 we are all wondering, and so
are they, what they meant in 19 14 and after-
wards. They are publishing books trying to
find out; the men of action as well as the men
of words. There are exceptions. It is not
that our statesmen are * sugared mouths with
minds theref rae ' ; many of them are the best

14 Courage

men we have got, upright and anxious, nothing
cheaper than to miscall them. The explanation
seems just to be that it is so difficult to know
what you mean, especially when you have
become a swell. No longer apparently can you
deal in * russet yeas and honest kersey
noes ' ; gone for ever is simplicity, which is
as beautiful as the divine plain face of Lamb's
Miss Kelly. Doubts breed suspicions, a dan-
gerous air. Without suspicion there might
have been no war. When you are called to
Downing Street to discuss what you want of
your betters with the Prime Minister he won't
be suspicious, not as far as you can see; but
remember the atmosphere of generations you
are in, and when he passes you the toast-rack
say to yourselves, if you would be in the mode,
' Now, I wonder what he meant by that.'

iEven without striking out in the way I sug-
gest, you are already disturbing your betters
considerably. I sometimes talk this over with
M'Connachie, with whom, as you may guess.

Courage 15

circumstances compel me to pass a good deal
of my time. In our talks we agree that we,
your betters, constantly find you forgetting that
we are your betters. Your answer is that the
war and other happenings have shown you that
age is not necessarily another name for
sapience; that our avoidance of frankness in
life and in the arts is often, but not
so often as you think, a cowardly way
of shirking unpalatable truths, and that you
have taken us off our pedestals because we
look more natural on the ground. You who
are at the rash age even accuse your elders,
sometimes not without justification, of being
more rash than yourselves. * If Youth but
only knew,' we used to teach you to sing; but
now, just because Youth has been to the war, it
wants to change the next line into * If Age had
only to do.'

In so far as this attitude of yours is merely
passive, sullen, negative, as it mainly is, des-
pairing of our capacity and anticipating a

1 6 Courage

future of gloom, it is no game for man or
woman. It is certainly the opposite of that for
which I plead. Do not stand aloof, despising,
disbelieving, but come in and help — insist on
coming in and helping. After all, we have
shown a good deal of courage; and your part
is to add a greater courage to it. There are
i glorious years lying ahead of you if you choose
to make them glorious. God's in His heaven
still. So forward, brave hearts. To what
adventures I cannot tell, but I know that your
God is watching to see whether you are adven-
turous. I know that the great partnership is
only a first step, but I do not know what are to
be the next and the next. The partnership is
but a tool ; what are you to do with it ? Very
little, I warn you, if you are merely thinking
of yourselves; much if what is at the marrow
of your thoughts is a future that even you can
scarcely hope to see.

Learn as a beginning how world-shaking
situations arise and how they may be countered.

Courage 17

Doubt all your betters who would deny you that
right of partnership. Begin by doubting all
such in high places — except, of course, your
professors. But doubt all other professors —
yet not conceitedly, as some do, with their noses
in the air; avoid all such physical risks.
If it necessitates your pushing some
of us out of our places, still push; you
will find it jieeds some shoving. But the things
courage can do ! The things that even incom-
petence can do if it works with singleness of
purpose. The war has done at least one big
thing : it has taken spring out of the year. And,
this accomplished, our leading people are
amazed to find that the other seasons are not
conducting themselves as usual. The spring
of the year lies buried in the fields of France
and elsewhere. By the time the next eruption
comes it may be you who are responsible for it
and your sons who are in the lava. All, per-
haps, because this year you let things slide.
We are a nice and kindly people, but it is

1 8 Courage

already evident that we are stealing back into
the old grooves, seeking cushions for our old
bones, rather than attempting to build up a
fairer future. That is what we mean when we
say that the country is settling down.
Make haste, or you will become like
us, with only the thing we proudly call
experience to add to your stock, a poor
exchange for the generous feelings that time
will take away. We have no intention of giving
you your share. Look around and see how
much share Youth has now that the war is over.
You got a handsome share while it lasted.

I expect we shall beat you ; unless your forti-
tude be doubly girded by a desire to send a
message of cheer to your brothers who fell, the
only message, I believe, for which they crave ;
they are not worrying about their Aunt Jane.
They want to know if you have learned wisely
from what befell them ; if you have, they will be
braced in the feeling that they did not die in
vain. Some of them think they did. They

Courage 19

will not take our word for it that they did not.
You are their living image; they know you
could not lie to them, but they distrust our
flattery and our cunning faces. To us they
have passed away; but are you who stepped
into their heritage only yesterday, whose books
are scarcely cold to their hands, you who still
hear their cries being blown across the links —
are you already relegating them to the shades ?
The gaps they have left in this University are
among the most honourable of her wounds.
But we are not here to acclaim them. Where
they are now, hero is, I think, a very little word.
They call to you to find out in time the truth
about this great game, which your elders play
for stakes and Youth plays for its life.

I do not know whether you are grown a little
tired of that word hero, but I am sure the heroes
are. That is the subject of one of our un-
finished plays; M'Connachie is the one who
writes the plays. If any one of you here pro-
poses to be a playwright you can take this for

20 Courage

your own and finish it. The scene is a school,
schoolmasters present, but if you like you could
make it a university, professors present. They
are discussing an illuminated scroll about a
student fallen in the war, which they have
kindly presented to his parents ; and unexpect-
edly the parents enter. They are an old pair,
backbent, they have been stalwarts in their day
but have now gone small ; they are poor, but not
so poor that they could not send their boy to
college. They are in black, not such a rusty
black either, and you may be sure she is the one
who knows what to do with his hat. Their
faces are gnarled, I suppose — ^but I do not
need to describe that pair to Scottish students.
They have come to thank the Senatus for their
lovely scroll and to ask them to tear it up. At
first they had been enamoured to read of what a
scholar their son was, how noble and adored by
all. But soon a fog settled over them, for this
grand person was not the boy they knew. He
had many a fault well known to them ; he was

Courage 21

not always so noble; as a scholar he did no
more than scrape through; and he sometimes
made his father rage and his mother grieve.
They had liked to talk such memories as these
together, and smile over them, as if they were
bits of him he had left lying about the house.
So thank you kindly, and would you please
give them back their boy by tearing up the
scroll? I see nothing else for our dramatist
to do. I think he should ask an alumna of St.
Andrews to play the old lady (indicating Miss
Ellen Terry). The loveliest of all young
actresses, the dearest of all old ones ; it seems
only yesterday that all the men of imagination
proposed to their beloveds in some such fren-
zied words as these, * As I can't get Miss Terry,
may I have you ? '

This play might become historical as the
opening of your propaganda in the proposed
campaign. How to make a practical advance ?
The League of Nations is a very fine thing, but

22 Courage

it cannot save you, because it will be run by us.
Beware your betters bringing presents. What
is wanted is something run by yourselves. You
have more in common with the youth of other
lands than Youth and Age can ever have with
each other; even the hostile countries sent out
many a son very like ours, from the same
sort of homes, the same sort of univer-
sities, who had as little to do as our
youth had with the origin of the great
adventure. Can we doubt that many of these
on both sides who have gone over and were
once opponents are now friends? You ought
to have a League of Youth of all countries as
your beginning, ready to say to all Govern-
ments, ' We will fight each other but only when
we are sure of the necessity.' Are you equal to
your job, you young men? If not, I call upon
the red-gowned women to lead the way. I
sound to myself as if I were advocating a
rebellion, though I am really asking for a larger
friendship. Perhaps I may be arrested on

Courage 2^

leaving the hall. In sudh a cause I should
think that I had at last proved myself worthy
to be your Rector.

You will have to work harder than ever, but
possibly not so much at the same things ; more
at modern languages certainly if you are to dis-
cuss that League of Youth with the students
of other nations when they come over to St.
Andrews for the Conference. I am far from
taking a side against the classics. I should as
soon argue against your having tops to your
heads ; that way lie the best tops. Science, too,
has at last come to its own in St. Andrews. It
is the surest means of teaching you how to know
what you mean when you say. So you will
have to work harder. Isaak Walton quotes the
saying that doubtless the Almighty could have
created a finer fruit than the strawberry, but
that doubtless also He never did. Doubtless
also He could have provided us with better fun
than hard work, but I don't know what it is.
To be born poor is probably the next best thing.

24 Courage

The greatest glory that has ever come to me
was to be swallowed up in London, not knowing
a soul, with no means of subsistence, and the
fun of working till the stars went out. To
have known any one would have spoilt it. I
did not even quite know the language. I rang
for my boots, and they thought I said a glass
of water, so I drank the water and worked on.
There was no food in the cupboard, so I did
not need to waste time in eating. The pangs
and agonies when no proof came. How cour-
teously tolerant was I of the postman without
a proof for us; how M'Connachie, on the other
hand, wanted to punch his head. The magic
days when our article appeared in an evening
paper. The promptitude with which I counted
the lines to see how much we should get for it.
Then M'Connachie's superb air of dropping it
into the gutter. Oh, to be a free lance of
journalism again — that darling jade ! Those
were days. Too good to last. Let us be grave.
Here comes a Rector.

Courage

But now, on reflection, a dreadful sinking
assails me, that this was not really work. The
artistic callings — you remember how Stevensor
thumped them — are merely doing what yoi'
are clamorous to be at ; it is not real work unless
you would rather be doing something else. My
so-called labours were just M'Connachie run-
ning away with me again. Still, I have some-
times worked; for instance, I feel that I am
working at this moment. And the big guns are
in the same plight as the little ones. Carlyle,
the king of all rectors, has always been
accepted as the arch-apostle of toil, and has
registered his many woes. But it will not do.
Despite sickness, poortith, want and all, he was
grinding all his life at the one job he revelled
in. An extraordinarily happy man, though
there is no direct proof that he thought so.

There must be many men in other callings
besides the arts lauded as hard workers who
are merely out for enjoyment. Our Chancel-
lor? (indicating Lord Haig). If our Chancellor

26 Courage

had always a passion to be a soldier, we
must reconsider him as a worker. Even
our Principal? How about the light that
burns in our Principal's room after decent
people have gone to bed? If we could
climb up and look in — I should like to do some-
thing of that kind for the last time — should we
find him engaged in honest toil, or guiltily
engrossed in chemistry ?

You will all fall into one of those two call-
ings, the joyous or the uncongenial; and one
wishes you into the first, though our sympathy,
our esteem, must go rather to the less fortunate,
the braver ones who * turn their necessity to
glorious gain ' after they have put away their
dreams. To the others will go the easy prizes
of life — ^success, which has become a somewhat
odious onion nowadays, chiefly because we so
often give the name to the wrong thing. When
you reach the evening of your days you will, I
think, see — with, I hope, becoming cheerful-
ness — that we are all failures, at least all the

Courage 2y

best of us. The greatest Scotsman that ever
lived wrote himself down a failure :

* The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow

And softer flame.
But thoughtless follies laid him low.

And stained bis name.*

Perhaps the saddest lines in poetry, written by
a man who could make things new for the gods
themselves.

If you want to avoid being like Burns there
are several possible ways. Thus you might
copy us, as we shine forth in our published
memoirs, practically without a flaw. No one
so obscure nowadays but that he can have a
book about him. Happy the land that can
produce such subjects for the pen.

But do not put your photograph at all ages
into your autobiography. That may bring you
to the ground. ' My Life ; and what. I have done
with it ' ; that is the sort of title, but it is the
photographs that give away what you have done

a8 Courage

with it. Grim things, those portraits; if you
could read the language of them you would
often find it unnecessary to read the book. The
face itself, of course, is still more tell-tale, for it
is the record of all one's past life. There the
man stands in the dock, page by page ; we ought
to be able to see each chapter of him melting
into the next like the figures in the cinemato-
graph. Even the youngest of you has got
throug'h some chapters already. When you go
home for the next vacation someone is sure
to say ' John has changed a little ; I don't
quite see in what way, but he has changed.'
You remember they said that last vacation.
Perhaps it means that you look less like your
father. Think that out. I could say some nice
things of your betters if I chose.

In youth you tend to look rather frequently
into a mirror, not at all necessarily from vanity.
You say to yourself, ' What an interesting face ;
I wonder what he is to be up to ? ' Your elders
do not look into the mirror so often. We know

Courage 29

what he has been up to. As yet there is un-
fortunately no science of reading other people's
faces; I think a chair for this should be founded
in St. Andrews.

The new professor will need to be a sublime
philosopher, and for obvious reasons he ought
to wear spectacles before his senior class.
It will be a gloriously optimistic chair, for
he can tell his students the glowing truth,
that what their faces are to be like presently
depends mainly on themselves. Mainly, not
altogether —

* I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.'

I found the other day an old letter from
Henley that told me of the circumstances in
which he wrote that poem. ' I was a patient,'
he writes, ' in the old infirmary of Edinburgh.
I had heard vaguely of Lister, and went there
as a sort of forlorn hope on the chance of
saving my foot. The great surgeon received

30 Courage

me, as he did and does everybody, with the
greatest kindness, and for twenty months I lay
in one or other ward of the old place under his
care. It was a desperate business, but he
saved my foot, and here I am.' There he was,
ladies and gentlemen, and what he was doing
during that * desperate business ' was singing
that he was master of his fate.

If you want an example of courage try
Henley. Or Stevenson. I could tell you
some stories about these two, but they would
not be dull enough for a rectorial address. For
courage, again, take Meredith, whose laugh
was * as broad as a thousand beaves at pasture.'
Take, as I think, the greatest figure literature
has still left to us, to be added to-day to the
roll of St. Andrews' alumni, though it must be
in absence. The pomp and circumstance of
war will pass, and all others now alive may fade
from the scene, but I think the quiet figure of
Hardy will live on.

Courage 31

I seem to be taking all my examples from the
calling I was lately pretending to despise. I
should like to read you some passages of a
letter from a man of another calling, which I
think will hearten you. I have the little filmy
sheets here. I thought you might like to see
the actual letter ; it has been a long journey ; it
has been to the South Pole. It is a letter to me
from Captain Scott of the Antarctic, and was
written in the tent you know of, where it was
found long afterwards with his body and those
of some other very gallant gentlemen, his com-
rades. The writing is in pencil, still quite
clear, though toward the end some of the words
trail away as into the great silence that was
waiting for them. It begins :

' We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot.
Hoping this letter may be found and sent to you, I write
you a word of farewell. I want you to think well of me
and my end.' [After some private instructions too
intimate to read, he goes on] : * Goodbye — I am not at
all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a simple
pleasure which I had planned for the future in our long
marches. . . . We are in a desperate state — feet

3^ Courage

frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it
would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our
songs and our cheery conversation. . . . Later — [it
is here that the words become difficult] — We are very
near the end. . . . We did intend to finish ourselves
when things proved like this, but we have decided to die
naturally without.'

I think it may uplift you all to stand for a
moment by that tent and listen, as he says, to
their songs and cheery conversation. When I
think of Scott I remember the strange Alpine
story of the youth who fell down a glacier and
was lost, and of how a scientific companion, one
of several who accompanied him, all young,
computed that the body would again appear at
a certain date and place many years after-
wards. When that time came round some of
the survivors returned to the glacier to see if the
prediction would be fulfilled; all old men now;
and the body reappeared as young as on the
day he left them. So Scott and his comrades
emerge out of the white immensities always
young.

Courage 33

How comely a thing is affliction borne cheer-
fully, which is not beyond the reach of the
humblest of us. What is beauty? It is these
hard-bitten men singing courage to you from
their tent; it is the waves of their island home
crooning of their deeds to you who are to follow
them. Sometimes beauty boils over and then
spirits are abroad. Ages may pass as we look
or listen, for time is annihilated. There is a
very old legend told to me by Nansen the
explorer — I like well to be in the company of
explorers — the legend of a monk who had
wandered into the fields and a lark began to
sing. He had never heard a lark before, and
he stood there entranced until the bird and its
song had become part of the heavens. Then
he went back to the monastery and found there
a doorkeeper whom he did not know and who
did not know him. Other monks came, and
they were all strangers to him. He told them
he was Father Anselm, but that was no help.
Finally they looked through the books of the

34 Courage

monastery, and these revealed that there had
been a Father Anselm there a hundred or more
years before. Time had been blotted out while
he listened to the lark.

That, I suppose, was a case of beauty boiling
over, or a soul boiling over; perhaps the same
thing. Then spirits walk.

They must sometimes walk St. Andrews. I
do not mean the ghosts of queens or prelates,
but one that keeps step, as soft as snow, with
some poor student. He sometimes catches
sight of it. That is why his fellows can never
quite touch him, their best beloved; he half
knows some tiling of which they know nothing —
the secret that is hidden in the face of the
Monna Lisa. As I see him, life is so beautiful
to him that its proportions are monstrous. Per-
haps his childhood may have been overfull of
gladness; they don't like that. If the seekers
were kind he is the one for whom the flags of
his college would fly one day. But the seeker I

Courage 35

am thinking of is unfriendly, and so our student
is * the lad that will never be old.' He often
gaily forgets, and thinks he has slain his foe
by daring him, like him who, dreading water,
was always the first to leap into it. One can
see him serene, astride a Scotch cliff, singing
to the sun the farewell thanks of a boy :

* Throned on a cliff serene Man saw the sun
hold a red torch above the farthest seas,
arid the fierce island pinnacles put on
in his defence their .^ombre panoplies ;
Foremost the white mists eddied, trailed and spun
like seekers, emulous to clasp his knees,
till all the beauty of the scene seemed one,
led by the secret whispers of the breeze.

' The sun's torch suddenly flashed upon his face
and died ; and he sat content in subject ni.^ht
and dreamed of an old dead foe that had sought and

found him ;
a beast stirred boldly in his resting-place ;
And the cold came ; Man rose to his master-height,
shivered, and turned away ; but the mists were

round him.'

36 Courage

If there is any of you here so rare that the
seekers have taken an ill-will to him, as to the
boy who wrote those lines, I ask you to be
careful. Henley says in that poem we were
speaking of :

* Under the bludgeonings of Chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.'

A fine mouthful, but perhaps ' My head is
bloody and bowed ' is better.

Let us get back to that tent with its songs
and cheery conversation. Courage. I do not
think it is to be got by your becoming solemn-
sides before your time. You must have been
warned against letting the golden hours slip by.
Yes, but some of them are golden only because
we let them slip. Diligence — ambition; noble
words, but only if ' touched to fine issues.'
Prizes may be dross, learning lumber, unless
they bring you into the arena with increased
understanding. Hanker not too much after
worldly prosperity — ^that corpulent cigar; if

Courage 37

you became a millionaire you would probably
go swimming around for more like a diseased
goldfish. Look to it that what you are doing
is not merely toddling to a competency. Per-
haps that must be your fate, but fight it and
then, though you fail, you may still be among
the elect of whom we have spoken. Many a
brave man has had to come to it at last. But
there are the complacent toddlers from the
start. Favour them not, ladies, especially now
that every one of you carries a possible
marechal's baton under her gown. * Happy,'
it has been said by a distinguished man, ' is he
who can leave college with an unreproaching
conscience and an unsullied heart.' I don't
know; he sounds to me like a sloppy, watery
sort of fellow; happy, perhaps, but if there be
red blood in him impossible. Be not dis-
heartened by ideals of perfection Which can
be achieved only by those who run away.
Nature, that * thrifty goddess,' never gave you
* the smallest scruple of her excellence ' for

ONTARIO

38 Courage

that. Whatever bludgeonings may be gather-
ing for you, I think one feels more poignantly
at your age than ever again in life. You have
not our December roses to help you; but you
have June coming, whose roses do not wonder,
as do ours even while they give us their
fragrance — wondering most when they give us
most — that we should linger on an empty
scene. It may indeed be monstrous but
possibly courageous.

Courage is the thing. All goes if courage
goes. What says our glorious Johnson of
courage : ' Unless a man has that virtue
he has no security for preserving any other.'
We should thank our Creator three times
daily for courage instead of for our bread,
Which, if we work, is surely the one thing we
have a right to claim of Him. This courage
is a proof of our immortality, greater even than
gardens ' when the eve is cool.' Pray for it.
* Who rises from prayer a better man, his
prayer is answered.' Be not merely coura-

Courage 39

geous, but light-hearted and gay. There is
an officer who was the first of our Army to
land at Gallipoli. He was dropped overboard
to light decoys on the shore, so as to deceive
the Turks as to where the landing was to be.
He pushed a raft containing these in front of
him. It was a frosty night, and he was naked
and painted black. Firing from the ships was
going on all around. It was a two-hours' swim
in pitch darkness. He did it, crawled through
the scrub to listen to the talk of the enemy,
who were so near that he could have shaken
hands with them, lit his decoys and swam back.
He seems to look on this as a gay affair. He is
a V.C. now, and you would not think to look
at him that he could ever have presented such
a disreputable appearance. Would you? (indi-
cating Colonel Freyberg).

Those men of whom I have been speaking as
the kind to fill the fife could all be light-
hearted on occasion. I remember Scott by
Highland streams trying to rouse me by main-

40 Courage

taining that haggis is boiled bagpipes ; Henley
in dispute as to whether, say, Turgenieff or
Tolstoi could hang the other on his watch-
chain; he sometimes clenched the argument by
casting his crutch at you ; Stevenson responded
in the same gay spirit by giving that crutch to
John Silver; you remember with what adequate
results. You must cultivate this lighthearted-
ness if you are to hang your betters on your
watch-dhains. Dr. Johnson — let us have him
again — does not seem to have discovered in his
travels that the Scots are a light-hearted nation.
Bos well took him to task for saying that the
death of Garrick had eclipsed the gaiety of
nations. ' Well, sir,' Johnson said, ' there may
be occasions when it is permissible to,' etc.
But Boswell would not let go. ' I cannot see,
sir, how it could in any case have eclipsed the
gaiety of nations, as England was the only
nation before w^om he had ever played.'
Johnson was really stymied, but you would
never have known it. ' Well, sir,' he said,

Courage 4'

holing out, ' I understand that Garrick once
played in Scotland, and if Scotland has any

gaiety to eclipse, which, sir, I deny '

Prove Johnson wrong for once at the
Students' Union and in your other societies.
I much regret that there was no Students'
Union at Edinburgh in my time. I hope you are
fairly noisy and that members are sometimes
led out. Do you keep to the old topics ? King
Charles's head; and Bacon wrote Shakespeare,
or if he did not he missed the opportunity of
his life. Don't forget to speak scornfully of
the Victorian age ; there will be time for meek-
ness when you try to better it. Very soon
you will be Victorian or that sort of thing your-
selves; next session probably, when the fresh-
men come up. Afterwards, if you go in for my
sort of calling, don't begin by thinking you are
the last word in art; quite possibly you are
not; steady yourselves by remembering that
there were great men before William K. Smith.
Make merry while you may. Yet light-hearted-

4^ Courage

ness is not for ever and a day. At its best it is
the gay companion of innocence; and when
innocence goes — as go it must — they soon trip
off together, looking for something younger.
But courage comes all the way :

* Fight on, my men, says Sir Andrew Barton,
I am hurt, but I am not slaine ;
I'll lie me down and bleed a-while,
And then I'll rise and fight againe.'

Another piece of advice ; almost my last. For
reasons you may guess I must give this in a
low voice. Beware of M'Connachie. When
I look in a mirror now it is his face I see. I
speak with his voice. I once had a voice of
my own, but nowadays I hear it from far away
only, a melancholy, lonely, lost little pipe. I
wanted to be an explorer, but he willed other-
wise. You will all have your M'Connachies
luring you off the high road. Unless you are
constantly on the watch, you will find that he
has slowly pushed you out of yourself and
taken your place. He has rather done for me.

Courage 43

I think in his youth he must somehow have
guessed the future and been fleggit by it,
flichtered from the nest like a bird, and so our
eggs were left, cold. He has clung to me, less
from mischief than for companionship; I half
like him and his penny whistle; with all his
faults he is as Scotch as peat; he whispered to
me just now that you elected him, not me, as
your Rector.

A final passing thought. Were an old
student given an hour in which to revisit the
St. Andrews of his day, would he spend more
than half of it at lectures? He is more likely
to be heard clattering up bare stairs in search
of old companions. But if you could choose
your hour from all the five hundred years of this
seat of learning, wandering at your will from
one age to another, how would you spend it?
A fascinating theme; so many notable shades
at once astir that St. Leonard's and St. Mary's
grow murky with them. Hamilton, Melville,
Sharpe, Chalmers, down to Herkless, that dis-

44 Courage

tinguished Principal, ripe scholar and warm
friend, the loss of whom I deeply deplore with
you. I think if that hour were mine, and
though at St. Andrews he was but a passer-by,
I would give a handsome part of it to a walk
with Doctor Johnson. I should like to have
the time of day passed to me in twelve lan-
guages by the Admirable Crichton. A wave
of the hand to Andrew Lang ; and then for the
archery butts with the gay Montrose, all
a-ruffled and ringed, and in the gallant St.
Andrews student manner, continued as I
understand to this present day, scattering
largess as he rides along,

* But where is now the courtly troupe

That once went riding by ?
I miss the curls of Cante!oupe,
The laugh of Lady Di.'

We have still left time for a visit to a house
in South Street, hard by St. Leonard's. I do
not mean the house you mean. I am a Knox
man. But little will that avail, for

Courage 45

M'Connachie is a Queen Mary man. So,
after all, it is at her door we chap, a last
futile effort to bring that woman to heel. One
more house of call, a student's room, also in
South Street. I have chosen my student, you
see, and I have chosen well ; him that sang —

* Life has not since been wholly vain,

And now I bear
Of wisdom plucked from joy and pain
Some slender share.

* But howsoever rich the store^

I'd lay it down
To feel upon my back once more
The old red gown.'

Well, we have at last come to an end. Some
of you may remember when I began this
address ; we are all older now. I thank you for
your patience. This is my first and last public
appearance, and I never could or would have
made it except to a gathering of Scottish

46 Courage

students. If I have concealed my emotions
in addressing you it is only the thrawn national
way that deceives everybody except Scotsmen.
I have not been as dull as I could have wished
to be ; but looking at your glowing faces cheer-
fulness and hope would keep breaking through.
Despite the imperfections of your betters we
leave you a great inheritance, for which others
will one day call you to account. You come
of a race of men the very wind of whose name
has swept to the ultimate seas. Remember —

* Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,
Not light them for themselves. . . .*

Mighty are the Universities of Scotland, and
they will prevail. But even in your highest
exultations never forget that they are not four,
but five. The greatest of them is the poor,
proud homes you come out of, which said so
long ago : ' There shall be education in this
land.' She, not St. Andrews, is the oldest
University in Scotland, and all the others are
her whelps.

Courage 47

In bidding you good-bye, my last words must
be of the lovely virtue. Courage, my children,
and ' greet the unseen with a cheer.' ' Fight
on, my men,' said Sir Andrew Barton. Fight
on — ^you — for the old red gown till the whistle
blows.

Printed by Wyman & Sons, Ltd., Fetter Lane, London, B.C. 4.

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY